I always thought that the ACLU were here to protect my rights what happen to them.
the ACLU was NEVER about Protecting YOUR Rights
.... founded by Communists in the 1920's to Bring down The Republic through the Court System
where they could not get laws passed in Congress because they would be unpopular
instead using the Courts to overturn the Bill of Rights through the Judiciary
- an old guy I worked with told me this in the 1990s
The Real History of the ACLU
I am for socialism, disarmament and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal.” ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, 1935
The left wing bias prevalent on college history faculties colors just about everything that shows up in mainstream history books. Textbook portrayals of Joseph McCarthy, for example, are very negative because liberals, including the great majority of university history professors, view McCarthy with hostility. The beneficiaries of this bias are persons and groups whom liberals view with favor.
One such group is the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU’s leaders and admirers are always claiming that the group exists to protect the individual rights of all Americans, without any political bias; but the claim is disingenuous. In reality the agenda of the ACLU is very similar to that of any other left wing group.
The group fights tooth and nail for abortion rights, for example, despite the lack of any clearly stated right to abortion in the Constitution, because the Democratic Party and the left in general are pro-abortion. They refuse to support gun rights, even though a citizen’s right to keep and bear arms is clearly spelled out in the Second Amendment, because Democrats and liberals opposed gun rights.
Defending Socialists and Inventing New Rights
In his widely used textbook Give Me Liberty, Columbia Professor Eric Foner introduces the ACLU this way:
The arrest of antiwar dissenters under the Espionage and Sedition acts inspired the formation in 1917 of the Civil Liberties Bureau, which in 1920 became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). For the rest of the century, the ACLU would take part in most of the landmark cases that helped bring about a “rights revolution.” Its efforts helped give meaning to traditional civil liberties like freedom of speech and invented new ones, like the right to privacy.
What Dr. Foner doesn’t say is that ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, and charter members like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, were ardent left wingers who identified with the Communist movement from the start of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.
Professor Foner does, however, display admirable candor when he credits the ACLU with helping to “invent new rights, like the right to privacy.” He’s referring to the 1965 US Supreme Court decision in Griswold v Connecticut, in which the Court overturned a stupid, but perfectly constitutional, Connecticut law against contraception. Eight years later this chimerical “right to privacy” would form the basis of the Court’s Roe v Wade decision, overturning state laws against abortion.
9 Facts About the ACLU
4. THE NEW YORK TIMES WAS NOT INITIALLY A FAN …
On July 4, 1917, the paper ran an editorial called “Jails Are Waiting for Them” arguing that “sensible people of good will do not make the mistake of believing that speech can be literally and completely free in any civilized country.” The author argued that “inevitably there must be restrictions on speech,” and accused the “little group of malcontents” of “antagonizing the settled policies of our Government, of resisting the execution of its deliberately formed plans, and of gaining for themselves immunity from the application of laws to which good citizens willingly submit as essential to the national existence and welfare.”
5. … NOR WAS PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON.
Woodrow Wilson was adamant that free speech didn’t always apply during a war. Arguing for a censorship provision in the Espionage Act of 1917, Wilson wrote to a member of Congress that censorship is “absolutely necessary to the public safety.” The provision didn’t make it into the law (although in 1918 the Sedition Act was added to the same effect), but that didn’t stop the federal government from suppressing some of the activities of the National Civil Liberties Bureau. Though relations between the group and Wilson’s administration were initially friendly, in July 1917, the U.S. Postal Service banned 12 of the NCLB’s pamphlets promoting civil liberties from being sent in the mail. In 1918, the Wilson administration found the bureau’s work in violation of the Espionage Act because it encouraged men to refuse to participate in the draft, and its office was later raided by the Justice Department.
